The Friday Link Roundup 28.11.14

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UntitledThe Friday Link Roundup is a feature wherein Ben’s Beer Blog lazily points you to other beery things worth reading on the interwebs this week.

 Bourbon County Stout Leading up to its annual post-US-Thanksgiving release, read about Bourbon County Stout from Goose Island, the folks who invented bourbon-barrel aged beer, via Esquire

 
 Beer tree
 Quartz has a really interesting family tree graphic illustrating the fact that the world’s 10 largest brewers produce 65% of the world’s beer.  
Bud An article in The Atlantic details Budweiser’s eroding market share, including the tidbit that “44 percent of people aged 21 to 27 have apparently never sipped an ice cold Bud“
 Mini bar
  Also via Esquire, one man’s noble quest to eat and drink the entire contents of a hotel minibar.

 

 

 

Contest: Win two tickets to The Craftmas Beer Experience

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You checked our shitters, honey?

CONTEST CLOSED: 

Congratulations to Phil for his winning comment and xmas movie and beer pairing:

Die Hard paired with Maclean’s Pale Ale because Yippy Ki Ay Mother Fucker!

Call me a sentimental son of a bitch but a comment that references my favourite Christmas movie, names an Ontario craft beer, and drops an eff bomb seems to me like what the holidays are all about. Congrats, Phil! Enjoy the Craftmas Beer Experience.

This holiday season, the folks who have brought The Beer Experience to Berkeley Church for the last two years as part of Toronto Beer Week are getting into the festive spirit.

The innaugural, aptly (if awkwardly) named winter equivalent, Craftmas Beer Experience, promises much of the same elements that have made The Beer Experience a success the past couple of years–and Ben’s Beer Blog wants to send you and a friend to the event to check it out.

Happening at District 28 near Toronto’s Port Lands on Thursday December 4th, The Craftmas Beer Experiences promises unique and festive beers from Beau’s All Natural Brewing Co, Black Oak Brewing, Cameron’s, Creemore Springs, Great Lakes Brewery, Junction Craft Brewing, Kensington Brewing Company, Mill Street, and Wellington, among others. There will also be food provided by Matt Basile’s Lisa Marie Food Truck.

Tickets, which include five drink tokens, can be purchased in advance for $25 each, but for one lucky Ben’s Beer Blog reader Christmas is comin’ early, because we’re giving away two tickets! Ho, ho, effing ho.

In the spirit of the season, to enter, simply leave a comment here letting me know your favourite Christmas movie, the perfect beer to pair with it, and why.

On Monday December 1st, the contest closes and I’ll pick the best/most entertaining entry to receive two free tickets. Preference may or may not be given to people who spread word of this contest via twitter.

(Use your real email address when you comment so that I know how to contact you)

The Original Snake Bite: return of the church key

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The O

Back in the day, when your grandparents wanted a beer at home, they couldn’t just crack one open and pour, they had to punch through the flat topped can with a sharp piece of metal. The crude device they used, called a Church Key, has fallen out of fashion in modern times as technology brought us the pull tab in 1959 and then, later, the push tab in the 1970s–essentially the same beverage can technology we use today.

Lately, however, there seems to have been a movement–whether it’s actually necessary or not–to attempt to create a can that pours beer even better. Coors, for example, patented the Wide Mouth Can in the late 1990s, Samuel Adams released their Boston Lager in “Sam Cans” in 2013 that, while they looked just like normal cans to me, actually featured an “opening [that] is placed further inboard on its wide top to allow for better airflow while drinking, which means the beer’s aroma, a major component of flavor, has a little more room to breathe.” Continue reading “The Original Snake Bite: return of the church key” →

Scotland’s Brew Dog is coming to Ontario

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Brewdog

Innovative Scottish brewery, Brew Dog, who have become famous across the pond as much for their beer as for their antics–having participated in the race to make the world’s strongest beer, winning that race by brewing a 55% beer that they packaged in road kill, made a beer at the bottom of the ocean, projected themselves naked onto the British Houses of parliament, sold shares of their company online to over 14,000 “shareholders” and, in just a few short years have become Scotland’s largest independent brewery–have announced their next adventure: they’re coming to Ontario.

I spoke to Stefan Milo Cornish of Premier Brands, the agency representing Brew Dog, who confirmed the rumours about which Ontario beer nerds have been speculating. Draught offerings of a handful of Brew Dog beers will be available here as early as next week. Continue reading “Scotland’s Brew Dog is coming to Ontario” →

Sierra Nevada is coming to Ontario

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sierra-nevada-pale-ale

There is exciting news for Ontario’s pale ale fans: Chico California’s Sierra Nevada Brewing Pale Ale will soon be available on tap in Ontario bars and sometime a little after that, on store shelves in your LCBO.

This weekend, I spoke with Andrew von Teichman, the president of Von Terra Enterprises Ltd, the agency responsible for bringing Sierra Nevada to Ontario, and von Teichman confirmed rumblings you may or may not have heard at Cask Days when that event’s organizers brought Sierra Nevada to Toronto along with a handful of other California beers for the event.

Von Teichman confirmed that Sierra Nevada Pale Ale will be available on tap in Ontario in February and that an LCBO launch will likely follow in March. The beer will launch exclusively on draught at all six Bier Markt locations on February 9th and then will roll out to other accounts in March. No other accounts are confirmed yet, but von Teichman tells me that they’ve talked to a number of restaurants and bars and, not surprisingly, they’ve basically just said ‘let us know when and we’re all over it.’ Continue reading “Sierra Nevada is coming to Ontario” →

Documentary on Ontario’s alcohol laws will stream online

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Capture

As has been posited by fellow beer scribe Jordan St. John, it once seemed like roughly every six months we were inundated with a slew of articles about the makes-you-want-to-smash-your-head-through-drywall-it’s-so-frustrating world of beverage alcohol in Ontario.

Six months seemed to be roughly the amount of time it would take people to forget that one company was allowed to have 440 retail beer stores in this province while the people who actually make beer in Ontario were still only legally allowed to have one. And so this was the amount of time that would pass before some article would pop up, cause some outrage, make the rounds on social media, then quietly die with nothing ever coming of it. Some beer writers may have even used this cyclical outrage to build a reputation as something of a shit disturber. Ahem. Continue reading “Documentary on Ontario’s alcohol laws will stream online” →

Quoted: Veteran brewer Michael Hancock on purchased draft lines

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Michael Hancock

“I would like to see an end to the illegal under-the-table dealings of most major and some craft breweries.

When dealing with licensees this activity completely distorts the true reasons for doing business which is surely to buy or make a product that is good and truly popular and then sell it for a fair markup with no further influences.

In order for this to happen the AGCO will have to enforce the rules that exist instead of slapping the hands of major corporations every few years with a fine that is so relatively small that it is seen to be merely the cost of doing business.”

Michael Hancock is veteran of Ontario’s beer scene, having worked in the industry for nearly 40 years. He was one of the founders of Denison’s Brew Pub where he developed his world class Denison’s Weissbier and since 2010 has been a partner in Collingwood’s Side Launch Brewing Co. He delivered the remarks above as part of a “Pioneers Panel” at the Ontario Craft Brewer’s Conference on October 16, 2014, when he was asked what he would like to see change in the brewing industry in the next few years. Continue reading “Quoted: Veteran brewer Michael Hancock on purchased draft lines” →

Beer and sick Asian food at DaiLo

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*I received financial compensation for this post.

Shane Mulvany at Lopan
To my mind, there are few things more disparate than Chinese food and a Big Mac and, if you were able to somehow bring these items together in one dish, my first guess wouldn’t be that it would end up as much more than a mess.

But that was before I had dinner at DaiLo.

Located in the former home of Grace at 503 College, an area which now boasts La Carnita, Snakes and Lagers, and Bar Negroni and will likewise soon welcome Grant Van Gameren–the guy behind Bar Isabel–right next door at 505 College, DaiLo reunites sommelier/front of house manager Anton Potvin and Chef Nick Liu, a duo that formerly found success together at Niagara Street Café. Continue reading “Beer and sick Asian food at DaiLo” →

When it comes to beer, taste isn’t all that matters

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drinking

In case you’re not among the 23,405 people who stopped by my blog on September 22, you aren’t one of the visitors who are still finding Ben’s Beer Blog in numbers that put my former best traffic days to shame, or you haven’t stumbled onto one of the many outlets who picked up the story after I wrote about it, you should know that for lack of a better term, I basically exploded the internet last week with a story about Shock Top, a beer that is made by Labatt and one for which they were planning a less-than-honest advertising campaign.

Obviously the story received the level of attention that it did because most people feel upset about the news that a large brewery was attempting to pretend to be a small brewery in order to increase sales of one of their beers. Indeed, by and large, that has been virtually everyone’s reaction–with a small but notable exception: Among the comments for that post, in the responses on reddit forums, and via twitter, there has been a small but vocal minority whose response has essentially been, “Who cares?”

This minority, some of whom I’ve talked to directly and others who felt the need to comment anonymously, have made roughly the same argument with varying degrees of tact and merit and that argument is “If the beer tastes good, drink it.” Continue reading “When it comes to beer, taste isn’t all that matters” →

The Friday Link Roundup 09.26.14

Posted on by Ben

UntitledThe Friday Link Roundup is a semi-regular feature wherein Ben’s Beer Blog lazily points you to other beery things worth reading on the interwebs this week.

Mergers On brewing industry mergers and the vaguely scary future of global beer consolidation via The New York Times
 Mexico
 Evil Twin Brewery’s Jeppe Jarnit-Bjegsø has a dispatch from Mexico for Vice to explain why craft beer there is exploding. 
beer tree For anyone who’s spouse won’t let them homebrew because of the ugly jugs, this might be the world’s most visually interesting homebrew kit. 
 rv
 Draft Magazine introduces us to Wild Run Brewing, a craft brewery making good beer in an RV park‘s former game room.
 hangover
 Australia’s favourite hangover cure is coming to America via Bloomberg
 Shaker
 The Atlantic has a surprisingly interesting (and lengthy) look at the history of the shaker glass.